DNS Issues on RHEL 6

Question

I'm experiencing some DNS issues on a new RHEL 6 virtual machine. Ping is working fine to an IP, but the machine is unable to resolve any names. I've tried adding Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) to the bottom of /etc/resolv.conf but it's not having any affect. Even manually adding items to my /etc/hosts file doesn't seem to work. Does something need to be reset? Anything else I can try?

This is the contents of my /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1      localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1            localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
209.132.181.16 download.fedoraproject.org
74.125.236.8   google.com

However I still can't nslookup or ping to google.com.

EDIT: Solved. Was a firewall issue blocking the DNS requests.

Solution

I know this issue has been solved, but in case someone stumbles across this trying to solve a similar issue, it might help to check /etc/nsswitch.conf to make sure the hosts line contains files when adding manual entries to /etc/hosts doesn't fix it.

Comments

[Huygens]

As you solved it, you should answer your own question and marked it as the correct answer. See How to handle self-solved problems